Getting leads from negative SEO practices

By Sef
Posted On
Sunday, August 03, 2014
//

Leads are important for all businesses of any kind, whether you are a small or enterprise business, your customers or clients are the most important for your businesses to succeed and survive, without them, your business is most likely to be closed soon enough if you don’t get enough customers or clients to serve. Especially for service provider companies that mainly
exist because of the need of their clients.

In Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) industry, getting
leads or clients is definitely a must for SEO agencies or even freelancers that are seeking for
companies to work with. They do this by marketing their websites –lead generation campaigns, creating epic win strategies via blog
post and rank in organic search to increase website traffic and even promoting
in social media channels or via paid search to eventually attract
potential clients. In most cases, it is generally easier for well established
firms or individuals who can get tons of leads via a single blog post.

However, this could be a long term process for startup SEO agencies and freelancers who have not yet
established their authority and reputation in the industry so it is more likely
that they will have difficulty in getting clients and compete with big SEO
agencies. So how can small SEO agencies or freelancers take advantage of this
situation and get the clients waiting for them?

In this article, I’ll show you how this can bedone without doing
much of work but through reverse
engineering unethical SEO practices.Yes,it is possible just by
tailing the unethical activities of some SEOs that Google do not approve.
Unfortunately, even after a lot of announcements, algorithm updates, and SEO
trends, there are still practices being implemented with an aim to
manipulate search rankings for various keyword terms and this is where you will
come in and lead them to the right path.

Find recently
published articles

We all know that getting links from article submission
sites are no longer powerful as it was and getting links from article sites are
associated with risks such as negative signal to Google. Since article
submission was widely abused by link builders to generate links on their
client's website, this has earned negative connotation to Google as unnatural
link building practice and could trigger penalty both manual and algorithm
filter which is a serious situation for a website to be in.

There are several reasons why links from article sites give
no value to a website such as:

Links from article websites are unnatural.

Links from article sites are keyword rich anchor text.

Links from article websites are low quality and
manipulative.

While article submission is no longer supported by Google,
it is still surprising that there are persistent SEO firms that keep doing risk
prone method. But you can make use of if for your advantage. Since it’s clear that
links from article sites are not useful for websites, hunting down recent
articles with questionable anchor text to corporate websites is a good way to
find potential clients.Here’s how you can do it.

Locate your source - You need to look for article websites that
often publish articles to discover the potential opportunities you can obtain.
In this section, visiting the largest article submission sites you can think of
is a good idea. Since big article submission sites often get a lot of active
users who are actively submitting articles for the sole of building links. You
can take advantage of their behavior to for your benefits.

Unconsciously, while they are performing manipulative SEO
tactics on their clients’ websites, they are somehow giving away opportunities to unethical SEOs to contact their clients
directly.

Identify publish date– To ensure
that the potential leads you will find are still connected with SEOs, unaware
of their strategies and relying on their help to increase traffic, exposure and
authority, check the publish date of each articles you will find just below the
title of the article.

Analyze each article–Another thing
that makes it easier for you to help website owners realize they are at the
wrong hands, analyzing the whole article could be a better idea to ensure that
the content used is within the business goals, objectives and more importantly,
industry.

Here are the key elements when analyzing articles you will
see in the article submission sites:

Topically Related to the Business

Article Length

Words or Key Phrases Used

Keyword Rich Content

Exact Match Keyword Anchor Text

Linking Pages from the Article

Make Appropriate Actions - Once you identified prospect leads from reverse engineering article sites, you
can put them altogether in a spreadsheet to enable you to track your campaign.

You need to provide basic but critical information such as:

Live URL of the link from article website

Name of the best contact person

Email address

Real life example

While doing this experiment, I checked on recently
published article I could find and analyzed the article content. I just
basically followed what Matt Cutts
mentioned on Google Webmaster Help Video
about getting links from article directory sites..

And here is what I found..

And this is what I did..

I emailed the website owner and here is the reply..

Imagine if you could send at least 20 emails a day.. At
least 1 or 2 will reply and it is up to you how you will convert them to be
your clients.

Look for low quality social bookmarking sites

Another method you can use to source for potential leads is
by looking at low quality social bookmarking sites orplig sites. Since low
quality websites was first targeted by Penguin to identify the low quality
websites that have obtain low quality links, finding websites that are
continuously getting links from low quality bookmarking sites could be a good place
to start and look for potential websites you can contact regarding the off-site
activity of their link builders.

Normally, a bookmark looks like is exact matched or keyword
focused anchor text so it won’t be difficult to identify a sample of manipulative
bookmark especially if it was bookmarked on a low quality bookmarking site. For
link focused service providers, getting social bookmark links are just one of
their tactics in creating links but this could trigger negative signal to
search engines and this is where you will come in.

By letting the website owners know that their website is
being spammed in terms of links, this could give you good impression to those
website owners. Since they don’t have time to understand SEO trends, do’s and don’ts and Search Engine Guidelines, letting them
know what could hurt their websites' online presence is a better way to make
you sound smart and look handsome.

Here is how to do it..

Look for social bookmarking sites with adult sections or
bookmarks - Since Google does not quality websites to get links from websites
with adult content or categories, getting links from websites with adult
content is not a good idea for long term purposes.

Identify bookmarks that are not written in English -
Another to way identify a manipulative negative SEO is to analyze whether a
bookmarking site is mainly written in English or non-English language. If you
will find a website tha targets only United States audience but linking to
german boomarking site, this is an ideal negative SEO practice and hence, need
to be addressed.

Look for bookmarks with exact match anchor texts - In 2011
onwards, it has become non-ideal for websites who want to rank in organic
search to practice keyword focused anchor text as it became widely abused to
manipulate search rankings which means, websites still practicing keyword
focused link building is a sign of manipulation that against Google guidelines.

Once you have a list of websites that are massively linking
on low quality bookmarking sites, you can then start reaching out to website
owners and let them know the risks associated with getting low quality links
with exact matched keyword focused link building.

Look for spam blog comments

Spotting spam blog comments should be undoubtedly easy as
identifying blog comments can be done just by looking at the comment itself or
even by the name used to leave a comment. If you are running an SEO blog, you
probably have encountered comments with questionable name and even linking
page/s in the comment that point to SEO agencies or even non-industry related
websites such as Legal, Insurance or Dental.

With that being said, that actually gives you opportunities
that you can explore and see if you can convert them into clients or leads.
Also, since there are automated blog comment tools that can be used to
skyrocket blog comment links, having a tons of prospects from blogs or sites
can just be overwhelming and therefore, a good place to hunt down potential
leads for your business.

To do this, you can just identify blogs or websites that
often accept and receive comments from various people by doing a filtered
search results.

Keyword + Blog Comments

Inurl: Write for Us + Keyword

“Guest post by”Industry

Once you have a list of websites that allow comments, you
can then start gathering information from comments section of the blogs or
websites you will find. To do this, you need first to analyze each comments,
links and names that were used to drop on the comment and just identify those
who are manipulative spammy such as:

Irrelevant comments

Irrelevant blog industry

Exact match anchor text as a name

Promotional comments

Once you have the information you need ready, start
reaching out to the websites that you will collect after you conduct your
analysis.

Guest blogging for links - Guest link building

Earlier this year, Matt
Cutts, the head of Google Web Spam
team recently announced the decay of Guest blogging which made a lot of
noise in the SEO industry especially
for those who have switched guest blogging for link building purposes.Traditionally
in link development space, if a certain strategy has been overly abused
by link builders, search engines like Google in particular will eventually take
action of their link acquisition method IF they believe it is against their
search engine guidelines and the main goal of building links is for link
manipulation.

Finding this kind of spam guest blogging for links could be
quite difficult especially if the link was placed before the decay of guest
blogging, exact match and author bio links. Normally, a guest blogger would
place a brand name in the author bio section that supposed to look
non-manipulative but not editorially given.However, it has become generally unwise
to link from author bio links as it can trigger manipulative approach in search
engines.

To get potential
leads from guest blogging tactic for links, analyzing the guest contributed
content in your target industry can be a good approach to start with.
Investigate those contributed content that you will discover to see if you will
notice any manipulative approach such as:

Duplicate Content

Keyword Rich Content

Topically Irrelevant Blog

When you identify guest contributed content that you
believe to be manipulative based on the analysis you conducted, you can start
reaching out to website owners or administrators by directly contacting them
and let them know about the method of their SEO to acquire links.

Conclusion

In any business industry, it does not matter how many clients
or leads you always get each day, but what matters is how you deliver the
service you offer to your clients. It is always important to be honest and true
when delivering the outcomes and reports for specific campaigns or projects
that you handled so that your clients
will always in the loop and aware of what they get from your services. So if
you are doing an SEO for a client, focusing on quality, user experience, conversion
rates etc are what’s really important than focusing and going crazy about
getting inbound links that can just only harm your website. Tsk

Joseph Gojo Cruzis the author ofRankingElite, aPhilippine-based Online Marketing
blog. Joseph has been working inSEOindustry for over 3 years fromwebsite audit,link and content development,social mediaandsearch
engine optimization. Connect with Joseph on Google+, Twitter,
and Facebook. Joseph is also a contributor
onSEJ
and Ahrefs.